I’m looking forward to Emily St. John Mandel’s event at the American Book Center in Amsterdam. She’ll read from Station Eleven–the book I saw in every airport in America this summer–and I’ll do a Q&A with her afterward. The reading is Friday, August 28, at 18:30; more info at abc.nl/events.

“I think you ‘stand’ being a woman exactly as I stand being me, what is oneself that one ‘stands’ but a peculiar cloudy fiery lens, an invisible intersection of fluxes of experience, a nothing that is everything and everywhere?”
–James Tiptree, Jr., to Joanna Russ, 1975

Alice Sheldon would have been 100 years old today.

In honor of Alice Sheldon’s 100th birthday, Australia’s Twelfth Planet Press is publishing a selection of “letters to Tiptree” by an impressive list of science fiction and fantasy writers, editors, critics, and fans. Nicola Griffith’s letter also appeared last month in the Los Angeles Review of Books. Brit Mandelo’s letter has been excerpted at Tor.com. More on Letters to Tiptree, edited by Alisa Krasnostein and Alexandra Pierce, at the Twelfth Planet website.

“I dreamt I was falling in love with Alice Sheldon. She didn’t want me. So I tried getting myself killed on three continents. Years passed. Finally, when I was really old, she appeared on the other end of the promenade in New York and with signals (like the ones they use on aircraft carriers to […]

For my book on mothers & writers I’ve been reading and thinking about the painter Alice Neel (1900-1984). Neel was known for her portraits; she saw herself as a political painter, chronicling her time “using the people as evidence.” She was especially sympathetic to people whose individual humanity has not always been acknowledged in paint: […]

Courage isn’t always as high-minded as we might like. In light of the PEN controversy I’m reposting my last January FB post about Charlie Hebdo, with my thoughts from an Amsterdam point of view.

Best of success to Patrick French, who was chosen by the estate of Doris Lessing to write her biography. From all the work I’ve done on her so far I think she’ll keep a biographer very good company. I’m looking forward to publishing my essay on her in The Baby on the Fire Escape; the story of Lessing’s motherhood is very different from the one you think you know.

I came late to the fantasy world of Terry Pratchett, and I might never have come there at all if hadn’t been for A.S. Byatt. In 2011 in Amsterdam I interviewed her for Trouw, and afterward we were talking about her book Ragnarok and science fiction when she asked me if I had read Pratchett. […]

Here, belatedly, are a couple of photos from the talk in Leipzig on “100 Jahre James Tiptree Jr.,” the first event of the Alice Sheldon year. I shared a panel with three of the people involved in publishing the complete works of Alice Sheldon in German: writer and translator Frank Böhmert; translator Elvira Bittner, and […]

Radio producer Eric Molinsky interviewed me in New York in October for a half-hour podcast on James Tiptree, Jr. At the time I I thought I was brilliant. Listening to it now I think that must have been a jet-lag-induced illusion. But Eric did a terrific job. It makes me wish there were recordings of […]